2. RE: Slow performance and windows services wont load

It likely isn't an issue with Zenoss itself but with the underlying virtualization infrastructure. There's a lot going on under the hood and Zenoss is sensitive to latency. Is the virtual machine running in an environment shared with other VMs? What's the VM density on the host? Have you checked the VMware metrics for the virtual machine; the host VM Ready stats, host scheduling stats, I/O stats? If you run top in the virtual machine do you see high CPU wait times?

Also, you should be using the latest release 6.2.1, not 6.1.2. There's been some serious improvements made since that release.